Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  Of course, there was the terrifying possibility, reinforced by my increased range in the aftermath of the equation, that when I’d actually held the equation, when I’d had all of its power and potency to put behind my wishes, I had been able to reach all the way from Iowa to Portland. I’d already demonstrated that while in the grips of the equation, I could convince space to bend enough to make transit between the two as simple as adding two and two together and throwing down the resulting number like a challenge.

  What if I had actually wiped myself from the memories of not just the people who were with me in this strange, lovely, potentially terrible new world, but also from the memories of everyone who’d ever loved me? What if we made it home and my mother looked at me the way she would have looked at any other cuckoo, unwanted and untrustworthy and terrible? It was a bit of a reach to jump from “I used the local minds as distributed computing space” to “and now my life doesn’t get to exist anymore,” but after the last few . . . days? Weeks? Time sort of loses all meaning when you’re plugged into the world-ending history of your species. Anyway, it was a reach, but that didn’t make it impossible. Not for me, not anymore.

  If I could convince Annie to love me again, without using telepathy to change her mind, maybe I could get my family back. Even if I’d wiped myself out of their memories and couldn’t possibly put myself back in. There was a still a chance all this could end with me going home. Maybe. If I did things the right way.

  Annie’s cheeks flushed red, a human biological response I’ve always sort of envied, and she turned her face away. “Whatever,” she mumbled.

  “My eyes are probably going to go white a lot while we’re out here,” I warned her. “We know where the human survivors are, but I didn’t pick up on any adult cuckoos, and that doesn’t make any sense to me. An entire species doesn’t just disappear.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “So maybe don’t point it out every time it happens? You’re just going to make me self-conscious, and then I won’t be able to focus on what we came out here to do.” Maybe this was going to work out after all. We could find the missing cuckoos, who were probably maintaining strong mental shields while they were trying to avoid being devoured by whatever had evolved to eat giant flying millipedes, and then we could join up with the boys and all go back to the classroom and start doing the math we needed to get the hell out of here. We could make it home in one piece, with the beginnings of a new trust between us. We could—

  And naturally, that was when the cuckoo came lurching around the side of the building, walking in the uncoordinated herky-jerky way popularized by zombie movies, head lolling to the left and arms stretched out in front of them, heading directly for Annie. Their eyes were blazing white, but I couldn’t pick up on any broadcasting thoughts or emotions from them. I shrieked and stumbled backward, out of the cuckoo’s reach, grabbing Annie and dragging her with me. She didn’t fight. The emotional wave washing off of her actually felt a spark of gratitude.

  “You were supposed to warn me!” she snapped, producing a knife from somewhere inside her shirt.

  “I didn’t hear them coming! I can’t find their thoughts!”

  “Please, please tell me that’s a singular ‘they.’” She pulled her arm back, preparing to throw the knife if the cuckoo didn’t stop coming.

  The cuckoo didn’t stop. I gathered my mind and shoved it forward as hard as I could, not making any effort to be gentle. The cuckoo still wasn’t broadcasting anything I could detect, not even as I reached the surface of what should have been its thoughts, the place where everything it was and knew and wanted began. I realized I was thinking of it as exactly that—an it—in the absence of any opinions or instincts about identity. I couldn’t say whether it considered itself male, female, or neither. I couldn’t say whether it considered itself anything at all.

  And then I broke the surface of its mind, and had my answer: it didn’t. All it contained was a whirling maelstrom of hurt and hunger, with no traces of identity or self-awareness anywhere in the black storm that was its psyche. If it had ever been a person, that had been washed away, destroyed by something so much larger than itself that it had had no chance of standing up against the storm, no prayer of survival.

  I pulled back to keep from getting sucked under, and a fragment of a function floated by me on the whirlwind of the cuckoo’s mind, numbers glittering like broken glass in the darkness. I gasped and pulled myself completely free just as Annie threw her knife.

  It caught the cuckoo in the throat. The cuckoo stopped advancing, made a choking noise, and fell. One thing I have to give my cousin, even when we’re technically at odds: she is a very, very good at killing things.

  “I know what did this,” I said, grabbing her shoulder again, this time to keep myself from falling over. My knees were weak, and my legs felt like they were on the verge of giving out. “It was the equation!”

  “What?” She pulled away from me, moving to retrieve her knife. The cuckoo, which was still gasping for breath as it bled out, clawed at her. She kicked its hands away.

  “The equation, the one that dumped us here and wiped out your memories of me,” I said. “I wasn’t just pushing it onto you, I was pushing it onto all of them. All the cuckoos who were in the ritual circle. When I finished the equation, I shattered it back into its component parts and distributed it between them. But I didn’t . . . I didn’t protect them from it the way I did you. Whoever this was before the equation, it was still aware when I forced it into them, and it ate them when it couldn’t find a way out of their mind.”

  “Huh,” she said. The cuckoo wasn’t gasping anymore. “Is it dead?”

  “The cuckoo or the equation?”

  “The cuckoo’s kind of the problem right now.”

  I barely had to extend myself mentally before I said, “Yes.” The storm wasn’t whirling anymore.

  “Cool.” She turned to me, eyes hard and expression as unreadable as ever. “I guess this is where I’m supposed to thank you for protecting me from a threat you created. I wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t let the cuckoos use you as their super-battery or whatever the hell it is they were trying to do.”

  No, you’d be clinging to the remains of your planet as it shook itself into splinters, I thought, and didn’t say anything.

  Annie bent to wipe her knife on the grass before giving me an assessing look—the intent was clear in the ribbon of thought that accompanied the expression, if not in the expression itself—and asking, “Are there more of those around here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You could tell where the survivors are, and those flying things, but you can’t hear other cuckoos when they’re practically on top of us? Because that isn’t at all suspicious.”

  “Okay, first of all, adult cuckoos can shield their thoughts”—although I wasn’t actually sure how well they could shield themselves from my new abilities if they were close by, I didn’t think pointing that out right now would help allay Annie’s suspicion—“but it wasn’t . . . look, I can tell when someone has an Aeslin mouse in their pocket, because mice think. I can pick up on dogs, cats, squirrels—even head lice. They have brains. Not big brains. Not complex brains. But brains. There’s something for me to latch onto.” Most smaller insects had neurons more than they had brains, simple nerves firing off basic instructions for the body to follow, or I would never have been able to sleep when I was within a mile of an ant hill. I was simplifying for Antimony’s sake.

  And judging by the mixture of boredom and dread she was projecting in my direction, it was a largely wasted effort. I could say virtually anything I wanted and she’d keep viewing me as a threat to her health, safety, and ability to eventually go home to her family.

  A family that no longer included me.

  I took a deep breath, the scent of disinfectant filling my nose, and said, “I couldn’t hear that cu
ckoo coming for the same reason I can’t tell you whether you’re about to come down with a cold. Viruses don’t have minds. They do what they need to do in order to survive, but it’s entirely driven by biological impulses too primitive to even qualify as instincts. They don’t think about anything. They don’t plan for anything. The equation is like a virus that way—after the equation ate what was left of its mind, the cuckoo didn’t have any capacity for thought left. So there was nothing left for it to broadcast. The equation took it all.”

  The equation in its completed form was big enough, powerful enough, to shatter worlds. What could it do when unleashed on something as small and fragile as a mind?

  “So you’re saying you can’t hear these brain-wiped cuckoos coming because there’s nothing left for you to hear?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, isn’t that just fucking awesome? And we don’t know how many of them are still running around here, and we don’t know what happens if they catch us—did you get anything before we went and killed the asshole?”

  “Hunger,” I said slowly. “But not . . . not physical hunger, exactly. It wasn’t going to eat us. But it was going to devour us, because that was all it knew how to do.”

  Annie turned to stare flatly at me. “You do realize you’re contradicting yourself, right?”

  “I do.” I shook my head, too frustrated to do anything else. “The words I need to explain this don’t really exist. I don’t know exactly what would have happened if that cuckoo had managed to get hold of us. But I don’t . . . I don’t think it would have been good, and I don’t think you should let Mark go anywhere alone if you want to keep him.”

  “Just Mark? Really?”

  “You and James are sorcerers. You can take care of yourselves. Artie’s a Price. He’s armed and he’s annoyed enough right now that he wouldn’t have any issues shooting someone who was trying to hurt him. Mark is a cuckoo. He’s never needed to learn how to defend himself. He just doesn’t want people to hurt him, so they don’t.”

  “You say that like you do know how to defend yourself.”

  I rolled my shoulders back in what I hoped would look like a defiant shrug. I didn’t feel defiant anymore. I mostly felt defeated. “I keep trying to tell you, I was raised a Price. Evie and Uncle Kevin took me most summers, and they made sure I learned the basics. I’m not as good with a knife as you or Very, but I can shoot, and I can lay a basic snare, and I know how to crush a trachea if I have to. I also don’t think a brain-blasted cuckoo will be enough to really hurt me at this point.”

  “Because you’re so much more evolved than they are.”

  “Because I’ve reached the final known instar and survived, and no cuckoo has managed to do that since they were banished from Johrlar. It’s not supposed to be possible.” Probably because surviving the equation required the willing cooperation and support of the people who loved me, and now they didn’t love me anymore. It was a sacrifice I didn’t know whether I would have been able to make on purpose, or if I’d known that it would be the cost. And how many cuckoos even had people who genuinely loved them in the first place?

  No, my family had turned me into something unique long before the cuckoos had come along and tried to turn me into a weapon, and I wasn’t going to belittle what they’d done for me by spending too much time dwelling on all the ways it could have gone wrong.

  “Great,” said Annie, a feral hint of joy creeping into her thoughts. “You go first, then.”

  “Sure.” It was easier to assign pronouns to the cuckoo’s corpse, since it wasn’t going to care. This one had been male, meaning its shoes were too big for me. Damn. I could really have used something to cover my feet. I started walking, leaving the body behind, glad to be moving again. If I tuned out the mistrust and discomfort coming off my cousin and focused on scanning the area around us, I could almost pretend this was a normal patrol, just two cryptozoologists going for a walk and looking for things that might be dangerous.

  Because Mom isn’t a receptive telepath—so far as I’m aware, the only thoughts she’s ever picked up on were mine, when my adoptive parents died and I panicked, realizing for the first time that I might not be as human as everyone around me; cuckoo children in distress are like human children in that they can scream incredibly loudly, more loudly than they could do consciously, sometimes loudly enough to hurt themselves. When the McNallys died and the policeman who’d come to tell me about my loss had tried to take me home, claiming to be my father, I had screamed myself mentally hoarse, and that had been enough to rip through Angela’s natural shields and let her hear me. That didn’t magically transform her into a receptive telepath. I don’t think anything could. And because she’s not a receptive telepath, she was never able to teach me how to manage my own telepathy.

  I’d been twelve when the lack of lessons on what seemed like it was going to be the most essential skill in my life had started to feel like a real problem. The walls between me and the minds around me were too fragile, and I might force people to do things they didn’t want to do. That wasn’t fair, or right, or human. And when I was twelve, my response to all problems had been the same: complain to my cousins. Annie, Artie, and I had put together a telepathic training program, with input from Elsie, who was better about going out in public than Artie was, and thus had experience with navigating her empathy in large groups of people.

  Sure, it was a curriculum mostly cribbed from Babylon 5 and old X-Men comics, but it had been enough to get me started and help me figure out what didn’t work. All my principles were self-designed, all my techniques were self-taught, and maybe it wasn’t going to be enough, but it was what we had. I released my hold on my natural desire to keep my own mind to myself, sending questing tendrils of thought into the area around us, looking for anything that felt like life.

  Through it all, Annie’s thoughts were a stable, disapproving constant, easy to find and follow, and that was enough to keep me from losing track of where my body was or what it was doing. I didn’t find any of the brain-wiped cuckoos, but that didn’t mean anything; they could have been absolutely everywhere around us, and without actively reaching out and making contact with the hunger that was all they had left to them—something I couldn’t do on purpose, since I didn’t know where they were—there was no way for me to detect them. Actions have consequences. Whether I’d meant to or not, this was a threat I had created.

  Annie knew it, too. This was maybe the first thing she’d believed since I woke up. Oh, she believed the mice; the habit of believing the mice had been ingrained in her since birth, and she could no more call a member of her own clergy a liar than she could accept that I was a cuckoo she’d called “family” of her own free will. Somehow, Mom’s existence only worked for her if she was an extreme outlier, the only good person our species had ever been capable of creating.

  Not to get all It’s a Wonderful Life about my own situation, but removing myself from Annie’s memories had definitely kicked the support out from some of her ideas about the world. It wasn’t as bad for her as it was for Artie, but it was bad enough that she was feeling shaky.

  I was still trying to focus on the question and ignore Antimony’s disdain when my thoughts brushed against something and I stumbled to a halt, staring at the building in front of us. It looked like every other university cafeteria I’d ever seen, with tall glass windows and shallow stone steps, flanked by a winding ramp for use by wheelchair users. A coffee cart had fallen over in front, probably during the transition between dimensions, and coffee and creamer were drying slowly on the sidewalk.

  “What is it?” demanded Annie impatiently.

  My mouth worked without a sound. This would have been so much easier if I’d felt comfortable speaking to her telepathically, and if I hadn’t been concerned that she’d put a bullet into my brain for even trying.

  Finally, I managed to squeak, “This is where we were going. The firs
t group of students is holed up here.”

  “These are the ones you said have some of the cuckoo children with them?” She pulled a gun from inside her shirt. “Did you find the rest of the cuckoos?”

  “No.” My throat was dry, and it was difficult to swallow. “I still don’t know where they are. These are the students the cuckoos didn’t get rid of before the ritual began.”

  Annie turned, slowly, to stare at me. I stared back.

  Neither of us said a word.

  * * *

  Technically, I was there when the cuckoos took the campus. I say “technically” because while I was physically present while it was happening, I was less a person and more a vehicle for the living equation. It had ridden me from Oregon to Iowa and begun the setting up of the ritual that was part of its function, that would allow it to blossom and truly live for the duration of its operation. I hadn’t been making choices. I hadn’t been truly aware of my surroundings, not in any meaningful way or on any conscious level. But I’d been there.

  And while I remembered the cuckoos taking the city, freezing the population in the middle of whatever they’d been doing at the time, leaving them suspended in a weird sort of half-life that had probably claimed a lot of full lives—you can’t stand in the shower forever without developing trench foot and possibly boiling yourself alive, you can’t stay in a tanning bed for more than a few hours, and there are probably a hundred other common, everyday situations that could end in death if extended indefinitely—I hadn’t been a part of it so much as I’d been a conduit, a way for them to move the power they had inside themselves into new configurations.

  If there was any mercy to the way the cuckoos took Ames, Iowa, it was that they hadn’t been malicious when they did it. They wanted to survive. They wanted to get away from the bomb they were priming to blow. They were planning to destroy the planet, and that had been damage enough for them, leaving them with no real desire to torture or humiliate the individual people who happened to get in their way. I couldn’t come up with a single instance of them targeting individuals.